Objective?-Name those East Africans you have in mind. Have them recommended!Objective?-Who stands a better chance to know Africa`s footballer of the year? Is it acclaimed BBC or likes of Isa Hayotu with itching palms?Most of us know the windy routes which monies straighten. Still in doubt? Hope we are not deviating---y are they talking of goal line technologies? To eliminate crooked refereeing manipulations!

nsiadi: Objective?-Name those East Africans you have in mind. Have them recommended!Objective?-Who stands a better chance to know Africa`s footballer of the year? Is it acclaimed BBC or likes of Isa Hayotu with itching palms?Most of us know the windy routes which monies straighten. Still in doubt?

I can't but laugh. BBC is an authority on Africa football just like your Wikipedia faceless experts are authorities on literature!

It's now obvious you know next to nothing (not meant to be derogatory) about literature or football. BBC know more about football than CAF?Windy routes indeed.

Continue that path. Achebe is the best thing that happens to the world's literature, he is no match, second to none, the best that con not be match. Are you happy now?

U avoid reacting to key issues. U react to selectivesOthers will like to know your opinion on Isa Hayatu & Adamu who served on FIFA committee on our behalfDo u know that that one of the new rules of the CAF committee is "No one wins if he isnt physically present @ d ceremony" Doubt it?These are the people who dish out what you want to believe. Try to distinguish bw Politics & realitiesThe group that selected Achebe that we are discussing now dont have ilks of Isa Hayotu & Adamu. Do they? Be direct

nsiadi: U avoid reacting to key issues. U react to selectivesOthers will like to know your opinion on Isa Hayatu & Adamu who served on FIFA committee on our behalfDo u know that that one of the new rules of the CAF committee is "No one wins if he isnt physically present @ d ceremony" Doubt it?These are the people who dish out what you want to believe. Try to distinguish bw Politics & realitiesThe group that selected Achebe that we are discussing now dont have ilks of Isa Hayotu & Adamu. Do they? Be direct

I want to be your friend. You have a great sense of humor and really make me laugh. Hayotu and Adama do not, exclusively, dictate the winner.coaches all over Africa contribute to the voting and selection process. So Hayotu having a itching palm will not bring dirt to the process.

Now, we know that CAF at least has legitimacy in conducting such process and awarding titles to the concerned players. On what authority is the so called faceless Wikipedia experts based their assessment and judgement? How many books did they assess, examined? How credible was the voting process?

Tell me more about this this saintly group without iota of blemish. The faultless all knowing literary minds! Please be direct. Who are they?

@ De MooreTx 4 the pep. Its necessary, @times, to take some people to the cleanersWe must be allowed to celebrate our own especially when they are jewelsWe will all be better off if we stop under rating others. You never know who has the capacity to hold on

Re read the posts above. You started the tribal stuff first before I responded in kind. See below:

Just because okocha had been a very prolific striker and was the best footballer in one year that everyone kept referring to that year as the africa finest moment in football would not make Okocha the best more so that he did not even have any continental awards to his name. That also does not take anything away from Okocha's greatness as well. That's the heart of the matter.

Snobbery? Guy leave matter and let's move on. Achebe is great, no doubt, but certainly not the africa's greatest.Winning small awards here and there does not compare to the main thing. Okocha won BBC's African Footballer of the Year but we all know who won the main prize. Same is applicable to Nobel Prize. Deifying Achebe and glorifying Wikipedia lists will not bring Achebe the much desired Prize. That does not add anything to what's already known.

You need to grow up and assess issue objectively without bias. If Nobel prize will be given to an African tomorrow, it's most likely not going to be Achebe. Why? There are several better authors in East Africa who on comparative basis are more deserving than this overrated, the so called finest, so called greatest, so called best known, so called genius. So it's not a Yoruba vs Igbo thing as some have erroneously labelled it. I am not a tribalist for all who cares to listen. my analysis or belief is purely from the point of what I have read, Africa wide, and the literary perceptions beyond Africa.

If we ask some of you to explain what you mean by Achebe being the Africa best, you, no doubt, have no fact or any shred of evidence to substantiate such a position. Why? No one, except people within your circle, would believe the so called best has not be able to win the best award why four other personalities have won such? No body in Europe, Asia, America, S America would believe your stories of a book being translated to a thousand languages. So try and be objective.

You have avoided this question time and again, "Who then is the Greatest?" Obviously, you have no better candidate but you cannot refrain from using Pull-Down-Syndrome to discredit the Greatest.

Kindly provide us names of your so called "several better authors in East Africa" since you probably keep tabs on them and their works. Another classic case of discrediting Prof.Achebe's reputation and bad belle

And I will appreciate you stop limiting Prof. Achebe's work to Africa's best. That list up there is not an African List. It's a world rating. and this is not the 1st time Prof is topping the list. Prof Achebe had gone global long before you knew how to read or write. Eat that

nsiadi: @ De MooreTx 4 the pep. Its necessary, @times, to take some people to the cleanersWe must be allowed to celebrate our own especially when they are jewelsWe will all be better off if we stop under rating others. You never know who has the capacity to hold on

What you do you another indirect dissing? Is he the best, second to none and the best thing that happened to Africa's football? I dey laugh

You had a plethora of Yoruba footballers to use for your usual sarcastic comparison but you again chose Okocha. So true about your blood.Is it that your tribe is bereft of a great footballer to use? Or you intended to discredit another Igbo son??Your tendencies are quite obvious

bestview: Things Fall Apart, the classic novel by Africa’s foremost novelist Chinua Achebe, has been named one of the “fifty most influential books of the last 50 years.”

The selection was made by a group called “SuperScholar.” Achebe’s first novel, published in 1958 and translated into more than sixty languages, is one of several novels by other world acclaimed writers. Other novels on the list include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Achebe, who is the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI, is the author of five novels, several volumes of poetry as well as essay collections. His latest book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, will be published in September, 2012.

50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years

In compiling the books on this list, the editors at SuperScholar have tried to provide a window into the culture of the last 50 years. Ideally, if you read every book on this list, you will know how we got to where we are today. Not all the books on this list are “great.” The criterion for inclusion was not greatness but INFLUENCE. All the books on this list have been enormously influential.

The books we chose required some hard choices. Because influence tends to be measured in years rather than months, it’s much easier to put older books (published in the 60s and 70s) on such a list than more recent books (published in the last decade). Older books have had more time to prove themselves. Selecting the more recent books required more guesswork, betting on which would prove influential in the long run.

We also tried to keep a balance between books that everyone buys and hardly anyone reads versus books that, though not widely bought and read, are deeply transformative. The Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa never sold as many records as some of the “one-hit wonders,” but their music has transformed the industry. Influence and popularity sometimes don’t go together. We’ve tried to reflect this in our list.

1. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), as the most widely read book in contemporary African literature, focuses on the clash of colonialism, Christianity, and native African culture.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

2. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) reinvented the science fiction genre, making it at once sociologically incisive as well as funny.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

3. Robert Atkins’ Dr Atkins’s New Diet Revolution (1992, last edition 2002) launched the low-carbohydrate diet revolution, variants of which continue to be seen in numerous other diet programs.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

4. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), drawing on his background as an evolutionary theorist to elevate science at the expense of religion, propelled the neo-atheist movement.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

5. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) set the tone for the questioning of political correctness and the reassertion of a “canon” of Western civilization.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

6. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), an entertaining thriller, has been enormously influential in getting people to think that Jesus is not who Christians say he is and that Christianity is all a conspiracy.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

7. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) transformed the way we view native Americans as they lost their land, lives, and dignity to expanding white social and military pressures.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

8. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) more than any other book helped launch the environmental movement.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

9. Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957), laying out his ideas of transformational grammar, revolutionized the field of linguistics and at the same time dethroned behaviorism in psychology.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

10. Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (1989) set the standard for books on leadership and effectiveness in business.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

11. Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (1996), though roundly rejected by the scientific community, epitomizes the challenge of so-called intelligent design to evolutionary theory and has spawned an enormous literature, both pro and con.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

12. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), in employing evolutionary determinism as a lens for understanding human history, reignited grand history making in the spirit Spengler and Toynbee.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

13. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) examines, in the context of a mystery at a medieval monastery, the key themes of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity.

15. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), in giving expression to the discontent women felt in being confined to the role of homemaker, helped galvanize the women’s movement.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

16. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) argued that capitalism constitutes a necessary condition for political liberties and thus paved the way for the conservative economics of the Reagan years.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

17. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995) showed clearly how skills in dealing with and reading emotions can be even more important than the cognitive skills that are usually cited as the official reason for career advancement.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

18. Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man (1971), in relating her experiences with chimpanzees in the wild, underscored the deep connection between humans and the rest of the animal world.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

19. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), in highlighting and elevating the differences between men and women in their relationships, challenged the contention that gender differences are socially constructed.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

20. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), by personalizing the tragic history of American slavery through the story of Kunta Kinte, provided a poignant challenge to racism in America.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

21. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988, updated and expanded 1998), by one of the age’s great physicists, attempts to answer the big questions of existence, not least how the universe got here.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

22. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) etched into public consciousness a deep skepticism of bureaucracies, which in the book are portrayed as self-serving and soul-destroying.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

23. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, last edition 1978) changed our view of science from a fully rational enterprise to one fraught with bias and irrational elements.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

24. Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981) transformed people’s view of God, exonerating God of evil by making him less than all-powerful.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

25. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) served as prelude to the civil rights advances of the 1960s by portraying race relations from a fresh vantage—the vantage of an innocent child untainted by surrounding racism and bigotry.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

26. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as an example magical realism, epitomizes the renaissance in Latin American literature.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

27. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue (1981, last edition 2007) is one of the 20th century’s most important works of moral philosophy, critiquing the rationalism and irrationalism that pervade modern moral discourse.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

28. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) provides a profound and moving reflection on the impact of American slavery.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

29. Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984-89) is a quintet of novels in Arabic focusing on the psychological, sociological, and economic impact on the Middle East of oil.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

30. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed> (1965), attacking car industry’s lax safety standards, not only improved the safety of cars but also mainstreamed consumer protection (we take such protections for granted now).

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

31. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks’ The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), though not the final statement on the 9/11 disaster, encapsulated the broader threat of terrorism in the new millennium.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

32. Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (1988) provides a sweeping view of 20thcentury’s scientific advances while at the same time challenging the reductionism prevalent among many scientists.

34. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971, last edition 1999) is the most significant effort to date to resolve the problem of distributive justice and has formed the backdrop for public policy debates.

36. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), which led Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a death edict (fatwa) against Rushdie, underscored the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and Western civilization.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

37. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), based on his wildly popular PBS series by the same name, inspired widespread interest in science while promoting the idea that nothing beyond the cosmos exists.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

38. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) details the massive impact that the U.S. fast food industry has had on people’s diets not just in the U.S. but also across the globe.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

39. Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development (1984, last edition 1997) develops an approach to economics that, instead of focusing on utility maximization, attempts to alleviate human suffering by redressing the poverty that results from economic mismanagement.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

40. B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) attacked free will and moral autonomy in an effort to justify the use of scientific (behavioral) methods in improving society.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

41. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (in three volumes, 1974-78) relentlessly exposed the totalitarian oppression of the former Soviet Union and, more than any other book, was responsible for its government’s subsequent dissolution.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

42. Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism (2000) argues that the absence of legal infrastructure, especially as it relates to property, is the key reason that capitalism fails when it does fail.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

43. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946, last edition 2004) sold 50 million copies and revolutionized how Americans raise their children.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

44. Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007, last edition 2010) provides the most trenchant critique to date of the financial and monetary backdrop to the current economic crisis.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

45. Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book, aka Quotations From Chairman Mao (1966) was required reading throughout China and epitomized his political and social philosophy.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

46. Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life (2002), though addressed to the American evangelical culture, has crossed boundaries and even led to Warren giving the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

47. James D. Watson’s The Double Helix (1969), in presenting a personal account of his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA, not only recounted one of the 20thcentury’s greatest scientific discoveries but also showed how science, as a human enterprise, really works.

49. Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), written posthumously by Alex Haley from interviews, portrays a complex activist for human rights at a complex time in American history.

[Amazon Link] – [Wikipedia Link]

50. Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor (1999, last edition 2007) lays out how “micro-lending” made it possible to provide credit to the poor, thereby offering a viable way to significantly diminish world poverty.

Some people cannot contain their neighbors achievement. It is an unsavory and bitter reality to them. Rather than celebrating with their neighbor, it's to line up several veiled and disgusting arguments only intended to tarnish someone else's achievement.

Your next door neighbor may not appreciate your achievement but the whole world continues to blow Prof. Achebe'a accomplishment.

I can imagine how bemused and embarrassed the Prof will be to see his name pop up every now and then in accolade after accolade after accolade.......

You have avoided this question time and again, "Who then is the Greatest?" Obviously, you have no better candidate but you cannot refrain from using Pull-Down-Syndrome to discredit the Greatest.

Kindly provide us names of your so called "several better authors in East Africa" since you probably keep tabs on them and their works. Another classic case of discrediting Prof.Achebe's reputation and bad belle

And I will appreciate you stop limiting Prof. Achebe's work to Africa's best. That list up there is not an African List. It's a world rating. and this is not the 1st time Prof is topping the list. Prof Achebe had gone global long before you knew how to read or write. Eat that

To the first part in bold, no be only the greatest na him be the highest. Pull Down Syndrome indeed. Since all your arguments have been severely dealt a mortal blow, it's not surprising your latest route. Read about these four writers and tell me which among them is not better than Achebe:

While you are at that, watch out for these two guys in the near future. They stand a better chance: Assia Djebar and Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Achebe tops the world lists compile by faceless experts on Wikipedia. Is that what you are celebrating? Why not called him the best thing that ever happened to literature on earth? It hurts me badly to say this but that's the truth: he is even far from the Africa's best so he stands no chance of shooting for the world greatest.

You had a plethora of Yoruba footballers to use for your usual sarcastic comparison but you again chose Okocha. So true about your blood.Is it that your tribe is bereft of a great footballer to use? Or you intended to discredit another Igbo son??Your tendencies are quite obvious

Sorry if that offends you but again Okocha fits the analogy more than any other Nigerian player. Well talented, often exaggerated and failed to win the much coveted African Footballer of the Year. So sad.

To the first part in bold, no be only the greatest na him be the highest. Pull Down Syndrome indeed. Since all your arguments have been severely dealt a mortal blow, it's not surprising your latest route. Read about these four writers and tell me which among them is not better than Achebe:

While you are at that, watch out for these two guys in the near future. They stand a better chance: Assia Djebar and Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Achebe tops the world lists compile by faceless experts on Wikipedia. Is that what you are celebrating? Why not called him the best thing that ever happened to literature on earth? It hurts me badly to say this but that's the truth: he is even far from the Africa's best so he stands no chance of shooting for the world greatest.

It remains obvious that the Nobel Prize is your Holy Grail. And until it is awarded to Prof.Achebe, he is not the best laughing in Arabic

Kindly answer my question:How often are their works referred to several years after they won the Prize

While you are scratching your head to answer me, please back it up with references as Achebe's references litter this thread.

If you must know, the highest award you can win in literature is Nobel prize, after that there is nothing to proof to the world again. You can't ask George Weah or Messi to proof their worth as a world best footballer having won the World Footballer of the Year. It does not make sense.

It's even an insult to start giving all these Wikipedia awards organised by the faceless so called super scholars, damned whoever gave them that appellation, to the acknowledged, world's accepted best.

If you must know, the highest award you can win in literature is Nobel prize, after that there is nothing to proof to the world again. You can't ask George Weah or Messi to proof their worth as a world best footballer having won the World Footballer of the Year. It does not make sense.

It's even an insult to start giving all these Wikipedia awards organised by the faceless so called super scholars, damned whoever gave them that appellation, to the acknowledged, world's accepted best.

To cut a long story short, irrespective of what I have written above, I personally believe Achebe is one of the Africa's best writers. He was the one that advertised African literature to the world and had consistently challenged the west of her rabid, sordid dehumanizing racism towards Africa.

I believed Achebe's troubles in winning Nobel prize might not be unconnected with his criticism of Conrad which was not well received in the West. Nobel Prize is not an automatic thing that once nominated, it becomes confirmed. Just like the CAF, or FIFA stuff, there is voting after nomination and that like other human activity, is subjected to politics of the day. Since he is not in a position to lobby for such vote, the result is of course obvious to us.

This is not in any way to discredit those who have won the award. They are hardworking, brilliant and excellent minds. But to some people, the guy with the Dean's award, the faculty prize or the first class student may in all honesty not be the best student in the class. But in official circle, award, rank is use for recognition and that is very essence of campaign by numerous people that Achebe should be given the honor he rightly deserved. But until that's done, his deification as Africa's best can't not be substantiated and will go against available evidence.

This is why our country can't (& maybe NEVER) grow because of our mind set here. The book is great & it has received world recognition... DEAL WITH IT!!!!!We should be happy a Nigerian book was among just as we were happy when a Nigerian won a Nobel prize.Arguing that Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa (with other tribes) is better WON'T & WILL NOT take us anywhere.Let's appreciate our people please.